At first he thought the sheet had tangled around his leg.
He pulled against it. Pain went through the thigh so suddenly that his breath stopped.
Daniel lay still.
The room was light enough to see the door. A bird outside repeated a short, unpleasant note. He could hear movement downstairs, a cupboard closing and the kettle beginning its long climb towards boiling.
He lifted the cover with his right hand.
Blood had dried in the sheet. A darker patch remained wet against his skin.
Three cuts crossed the outside of his right thigh. Not deep enough to show something he'd never wanted to see, but open, ugly, the skin between them pulled tight and bruised. One began higher than the others and vanished beneath the leg of his shorts.
He moved the fabric carefully.
It had stuck.
“Fuck.”
The word came out small.
He reached for the phone, then stopped because his chest hurt as he turned. He lifted his T-shirt. Beneath it a bruise spread from one side of the breastbone towards the ribs, dark in the centre, violet at the edges.
He touched it lightly.
The pain was immediate.
There was blood on his right hand now. The left lay beside him, scarred and familiar. For a moment he was grateful that it looked no worse.
He listened for Leah.
A spoon knocked against a mug.
She was making tea while he lay here opened again.
“Leah.”
His voice wasn't loud enough.
He tried once more, louder. Footsteps came towards the stairs.
Daniel looked at the camera.
Its little light was still on.
He picked up the phone, unlocked it and opened the recording before Leah reached the room. He didn't mean to hide it. He wanted one second in which the answer belonged to him, before someone he loved had to know what he was.
The image showed the bed in darkness.
He was in it.
The cover lay at an angle. His right leg was turned out beneath it, the left hand near his face. He looked more deeply asleep than he ever felt.
Leah appeared in the doorway.
“Dan?”
He didn't answer.
“What happened?”
“Again.”
She crossed to the bed, saw the sheet and went still.
“Oh, God.”
“The camera.”
She looked at his leg.
“We need—”
“Wait.”
He moved the recording backwards. The room on the screen emptied, then he was there again, pulling the cover up, putting the phone face down. He could hear himself move because he'd left the sound on.
A long stretch of sleep.
He moved forward slowly, watching his own body roll, settle, lift one hand to his neck and let it fall.
Then the door opened.
Daniel stopped the recording.
A man stood in the doorway.
The picture was grey, flattened by the camera's night view, but Daniel knew the face. Long, lean, a little uneven around the mouth. The same man whose wet coat he'd hung over a chair at their thank-you meal in early July, after Leah came out of hospital. His appetite that evening had delighted her.
Silas.
For a moment Daniel saw him in their kitchen, smiling over the bowl while Leah asked if he wanted more.
The man on the screen had one hand on the door.
Daniel's own body lay asleep a few feet away.
Leah bent closer.
“That's—”
“Yes.”
“Silas?”
“Yes.”
He touched the screen.
The recording continued.
Silas closed the bedroom door. Quietly, lifting the handle so it didn't click. He had taken his shoes off; Daniel could see them held by their heels in one hand. He put them beside the chair.
Then he looked towards the bed.
The little Daniel on the screen moved his face against the pillow.
Silas waited.
Leah put a hand over her mouth.
They watched the man unbutton his shirt.
He didn't hurry. He folded it once, laid it on the chair, removed his trousers and stepped out of them. Underneath he wore nothing. His body was narrow at the waist, the ribs visible when he lifted his arms. A pale scar ran from the hip towards the stomach.
Daniel remembered him stepping out of the river fully dressed. An ordinary man's body doing an impossible thing before Daniel had known there was any impossibility to look for.
On the recording, Silas knelt beside the bed.
Not touching Daniel yet. He laid his palms on the floor and lowered his head as if listening to something below the boards.
The time changed to midnight.
Silas's shoulders rose.
At first it looked like a movement he had chosen, a deep breath which pulled the bones away from his neck. Then the shoulder blades moved further than they should. His back arched and his fingers spread against the floor.
The sound was quiet.
That made it worse.
A series of small cracks. A low noise from his mouth, almost a laugh until it became something he couldn't have spoken through. The spine lifted beneath the skin, a ridge becoming longer while the rest of him struggled to keep up.
Leah stepped back.
Daniel couldn't.
The man turned his face slightly towards the camera. His jaw opened. It didn't close in the same shape.
Skin darkened across the shoulders. Hair rose through it in patches that ran together, spreading faster than Daniel could understand. The arms shortened as the body lengthened. Hands dragged on the floor, fingers no longer fingers, elbows moving under the weight of something which had begun to stand on them.
Silas's face disappeared.
Not behind anything. The things which made it his face moved apart. The nose lengthened, the mouth drew forward, the skull seeming to push itself into the new arrangement while he kept making that low, unbearable sound.
Beside him, Daniel slept.
The cover slipped a little with his breathing.
The wolf stood.
It was enormous in the bedroom. Bigger than the shape Daniel's mind wanted to give it, its back nearly level with the mattress, dark fur thick along the neck. Its head turned towards the sleeping man.
A paw came down beside his hand.
The animal lowered its nose to his face.
Daniel felt the touch before he saw it happen. A wet nose almost against his cheek, a breath which must have warmed his skin. On the recording he turned away without waking.
The wolf waited.
Then it moved.
It had to angle its body through the doorway, and the claws caught briefly against the floor. The door swung wider. It passed into the landing, out of the picture.
Silas's clothes remained on the chair.
Leah said something.
Daniel didn't hear it.
He watched the empty doorway. His body on the screen still breathing, still occupying the bed as if the room had remained his.
The recording ran on.
Leah was beside him again.
“Stop it.”
He touched the screen.
The image froze.
Her face had lost colour. She looked at the chair in their actual room, where a pair of her jeans hung over the back.
“That's where he put them.”
Daniel looked at the chair.
There was nothing to see. No folded shirt, no evidence of the body which had stopped being human a few feet from where he sat.
“Did you hear anything?” he asked.
“No.”
“I was here.”
“I know.”
“Right there.”
Leah put her hand on his shoulder, then took it away because he flinched.
“We need to deal with your leg.”
He looked down as though she'd reminded him of someone else's problem.
The cuts were still there.
“What did I do?”
“You didn't.”
“I might have got up after.”
“Dan.”
He began moving through the rest of the night.
His body changed position. Once he pulled the pillow towards him. At some point he turned onto his back, the cover slipping lower.
Nothing else happened until the doorway darkened.
Daniel stopped moving through it.
The wolf had returned.
It stood half in the room, head low. The right rear leg wasn't taking its share of the weight. Pale streaks marked the fur along it; darker fluid dripped onto the floor.
Its breathing came through the phone, rapid and rough.
The wolf moved to the bed. It almost fell beside it, catching itself on its forelegs. For a moment the mouth hung open and Daniel could see the tongue lying too heavily inside.
Then the shape began to change again.
This time he watched the fur shrink away from the wet places. Watched the legs lengthen into a man's limbs, the feet curl against the floor, the shoulders become too narrow to hold the head until the head became smaller.
Silas crouched beside the mattress.
He was bleeding.
The cuts on his right thigh were open in exactly the places Daniel had seen beneath the sheet. A dark swelling crossed his chest. He pressed his arm against it, shut his eyes and made a short sound of pain.
A man's pain.
Daniel looked at his own leg and then at the screen.
“No.”
Silas rose.
He lifted the cover, exposing Daniel's sleeping body from the chest down to the knees. The thigh on the screen was whole.
Leah crouched beside the bed so she could see more clearly.
Silas rolled the T-shirt up beneath Daniel's arms.
The sleeping man made a small sound.
Silas placed his bare palm against the centre of Daniel's chest.
He held it there.
Daniel watched the breath enter his own lungs, lift the hand resting on him, leave.
On Silas's thigh, the cuts began closing.
The movement was slow enough to see. Edges drawing together, wet skin turning smooth, blood left on a body which no longer seemed to have a place for it to come from.
Under the phone's grey light, lines appeared on the sleeping man's leg.
One. Another. The third opened a little higher.
Daniel's hand closed around the phone so hard the case creaked.
Leah said, “Oh, fuck.”
Blood ran onto the sheet.
His recorded body didn't move.
The bruise across Silas's chest thinned and faded. Beneath the rolled-up T-shirt, Daniel's skin darkened.
Still he slept.
Silas took his hand away.
For several seconds the man stood looking down at him. Then he lowered Daniel's shirt, drew the cover over the bleeding leg and bent close to his ear.
The voice came out of the phone.
“You agreed to this.”
Silas touched the side of his sleeping face.
Daniel pulled away from the touch now, six hours too late.
On the recording, the man dressed. Picked up his shoes. Went through the doorway and closed the door so softly that the sound scarcely reached the camera.
The bed remained.
A body beneath its cover, wounded and quiet.
Daniel turned the phone face down.
He could hear his own breathing in the room. Too fast.
Leah stood.
“I'm getting something clean for the leg. Then we're going.”
He couldn't look at her.
On the flooded road, the man had asked if he would carry his hurt.
Daniel remembered it. Every word he'd said back. The rain against his bare chest where his shirt had torn, the warm hand, his own willingness to give anything if Leah came out of the water.
He had thought there would be one hurt.
Perhaps a cut. Perhaps the cold. Perhaps he hadn't thought of any particular injury because the car was below the surface and she was still in it.
Silas had saved her.
Daniel could remember her coughing water onto the road, the sound he had wanted more than any word he knew.
He began to shake.
Leah came back with a clean towel and knelt beside the bed.
“Tell me if I hurt you.”
The sentence made him close his eyes.
She pressed the folded cloth where the sheet had stuck. He helped with his right hand because she needed him to, because there was still something he could do with the body lying here.
The phone was on the pillow beside him.
He turned it over, found the recording and made sure it was kept. Leah watched him without asking.
Then she said, “We'll watch it again later. If we have to.”
He nodded.
Across the room, the little white camera stood on its books.
It had done exactly what he'd asked.